La Estrellita del Sur

It sits at Jr. Pedro Conde 413 in Lince, a few blocks from Av. Arenales: an old, heavily rebuilt room that has been cooking Arequipa food in Lima for more than five decades. The menu is picantería fare; among the dishes Google flags as popular are the cuy chactado and the tocino de cielo, while reviews keep repeating the rocoto relleno, the fried udder, the solterito and the queso helado. Our read: this is a transplanted picantería, not an author's take on Arequipa cooking — its value is that it still serves the full dishes, the ones almost nobody makes in Lima any more, and that it has done so for decades; the room itself is not the draw. It is daytime only: the house advertises 8:30 to 17:00 every day, so there is no dinner service. It has a bar, free wifi, high chairs and live music, and parking on the block is a struggle. Curation note: the laestrellitadelsur.com domain that Google still links no longer belongs to the restaurant — it now redirects to an unrelated site — so it was not loaded as the official website; the address and hours come from the house's Instagram.